Pivotal, the company that was spun out from EMC and VMware last year, has unveiled its first product: a new, cross-cloud platform-as-a-service offering called Pivotal One.  

It will, the company claims, allow companies to build data intensive, cloud-hosted applications akin to the "consumer Internet" platforms of Facebook and Google. 

The platform combines cloud orchestration and automation technology from VMware's CloudFoundry product; big data analytics functionality based on Hadoop and from EMC's Greenplum acquisition; and software development features from EMC acquisition Pivotal Labs. 

At a press conference this afternoon, Pivotal CEO Paul Martiz (former CEO of VMware) said the PaaS represents the third generation of IT platforms. 

"The first generation was the mainframe, and was designed for automating financial activities," he said. "The second generation was driven by the need for more sophisticated applications, which in turn need more sophisticated hardware."

"We believe we're on the verge on a transition to a third platform, driven by a new class of applications," he said. 

That new class of data-intensive applications is typified by the web platforms of Facebook and Google, but could have uses in industries such as telecommunications and industrial control systems.

The first commercial release of Pivotal One will be released in the fourth quarter of this year. "However the journey to delivering the full vision will be measured in years, not months," said Greenplum co-founder and Pivotal exec Scott Yara.

EMC and VMware announced Pivotal back in December 2012. It is made up of 800 former EMC employees, and 600 former VMware workers.